The Rumpus needs your help.
Today, we’re launching this $10K crowdfunding campaign to redesign the magazine’s website. We’ve been running on the same WordPress template since the site launched 14 years ago, which makes it like 1,400 in internet-years.
Do you remember the Internet 14 years ago? That was before I owned a smartphone. As you’ve probably noticed, the site is wildly outdated, not mobile friendly, nearly impossible to search, and glitchy with formatting poetry and comics especially. We get a large amount of traffic (~150K unique viewers/month and over a million a year!), but it’s mostly duct tape back here. It’s frustrating to our volunteer team of editors and the 400+ authors we publish every year. An update is overdue. We’ve already lost some of our comics and most of our video archives by waiting this long.
The total cost of the redesign is $20K, but (thankfully!) we recently received fiscal sponsorship via Fractured Atlas, and were able to apply for and win our first grant: a Capacity Building award from CLMP that covers half the costs. While this is helpful, there aren’t many grants out there for literary magazines, and we can’t count on winning all the monies.We already have a trusted designer on board and a contract we can sign once the funds are raised. If we hit our goal in June, we’ll be able to relaunch this fall!
How will your donations help the magazine’s team, our contributors, and the literary community? Reaching this fundraising goal will allow us to:
- Reorganize and modernize the site. We’ll be able to highlight and feature content—what a wild concept!
- Vastly improve our ability to format poetry as the writer intended
- Publish original comics with higher-resolution and faster-loading artwork
- Save us countless hours dealing with security, technical, and formatting issues
- Finally let us have multiple editors working directly in the website to input content (that’s right, we’ve been managing off documents and emails for many years)
- Apply contemporary best coding practices to provide more admin and editorial tools for easier maintenance + future updates and releases
- Allow readers and contributors to browse our deep archives
- Reduce shame when sharing the website with new readers 🙂
Over 90% of the magazine’s funding comes from reader support. We have a Membership program, a Poetry Book Club, and merch; we receive donations; and we make a very small amount of money through advertising. These currently have us breaking even, but there is no extra revenue to support a website redesign.
This project is something we’ve put off for far too long and is causing us to make expensive, tedious emergency fixes more and more often. ALL funds raised will directly support the magazine’s website redesign. Contributions in any amount are appreciated!
IF YOU’RE ABLE TO GIVE RIGHT NOW, BEFORE MIDNIGHT EST JUNE 14, PLEASE DO! We’d like to start the redesign quickly, so we can relaunch by this fall, and we need YOUR support. Please invest in The Rumpus‘s present and the literary community’s future.
— Alyson Sinclair, Publisher
